The Elizabethans must have had a completely different attitude to physical violence. For a start, it was an inherent part of their system of justice. Even when we had the death penalty, killing someone in the name of justice was expected to be as quick and painless as possible. The hangman’s craft was to assess his subject’s body in a way that would ensure a clean quick twist of the neck, not slow and painful strangulation; that would be a bad hanging.
But the Elizabethan hangman’s art was different. In the case of traitors, for instance, prolonging the pain, extending the humiliation, was a part of the punishment, part of the justice. A hanging was a public piece of theatre; the scaffold, a stage on which the state took revenge. Macbeth, after he murdered Duncan, stares at his bloodstained hands and calls them his ‘hangman’s hands’.
Why should a hangman’s hands be bloody? Because his art was to partially hang his victim and then disembowel him while he was still alive, cut out his heart and show it to him, wanting him to be conscious enough to take this in before cutting his body into pieces.
Although we have plenty of access to violence today, whether real or pretend, it neither has the same relationship to the judicial system, to its state-sponsored theatre, nor the same intimacy – heads on Tower Bridge, or the roar of the bear-pit.
Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus is about Revenge and Justice. At one point, Titus shouts ‘Justice has fled the earth’, and the play explores the dilemmas we face when the state itself is responsible for crimes against us. The play begins with Titus, Rome’s foremost general, returning to Rome from wars against the Goths.
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